MC_A Concise History of Africa

Independence and Nationhood

BELOW: Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra, Ghana, named after Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the founding father and first President of Ghana. OPPOSITE ABOVE: Côte d'Ivoire President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, his wife Marie-Thérèse Houphouët-Boigny, United States First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, and her husband US President John F. Kennedy in 1962. OPPOSITE BELOW: Jomo Kenyatta was the leader of Kenya from its independence in 1963 to his death in 1978, serving first as prime minister (1963–64) and then as president (1964–78). He is considered the founding father of the Kenyan nation.

After the Second World War, colonialism in Africa was suddenly put on the defensive, when a rising tide of nationalist protest began to challenge the legitimacy of alien occupation, with the result that “development” became the more explicit goal of colonial power. Movements developed against colonialism, such as Pan- Africanism , while a literary movement, Négritude, came to the fore in Francophone Africa, but waned when it was seen to be promoting racial stereotyping. The decolonization of Africa followed as colonized peoples

began to agitate for independence, having come to the aid of their masters in time of war against an unknown enemy. Potential leaders came from a Western-educated elite, with men like Kenyatta in Kenya, Nkrumah in Ghana, Senghor in Senegal, and Houphouët-Boigny in the Côte d’Ivoire. Many were left-wing Marxist-Leninists and anti-imperialist pro-land reformers. Socialism was felt to be the remedy for African problems, allied against capitalism, but the spread of international capitalism and globalization was to prove unstoppable.

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